The circumstances attending this murder and the prominence of the man slain aroused at last a storm of indignation throughout the land. Newspapers of other States condemned Kentucky so severely that public sentiment within the State itself became aroused and forced the investigations which revealed Breathitt County's history of blood and crime. In spite of the most strenuous efforts from certain quarters to hush the matter up and to block investigations of the damnable plots and murderous conspiracies by men entrusted with the enforcement of the law, the public was at last made acquainted with conditions of affairs in Breathitt County, which presented a picture so harrowing and degrading that the civilized world stood aghast and for a time refused to believe. * * * * * Breathitt is a beautiful mountain county along the Kentucky River, scarcely forty miles distant from Lexington, the metropolis of the Kentucky Bluegrass, famous the world over for the refinement of her people. Jackson is the county seat, a small but thriving town on the Kentucky River, built upon numerous hills, which give it an irregular, though by no means displeasing appearance. Commercially, Jackson is prosperous, surprisingly so under the circumstances. How much more rapid and greater might have been its progress but for the deplorable epidemics of murder, none can tell. Jackson is also the terminus of three railroads. The town has good schools and several churches, but church-going, schools and trading were sadly interrupted and at times completely stopped during the reign of terror which held Breathitt in its bloody clutches during the first decade of the present century. It is impossible in a limited space to give more than passing notice to all of the feudal wars which have been fought from time to time in Breathitt County. To do so would fill a volume. What the reader finds detailed in this chapter relates principally to the Hargis-Cockrell-Marcum-Callahan vendetta. It is the most recent feud. What transpired during it is but a repetition of what had occurred in others. The first widespread feud in Breathitt County originated immediately after the Civil War. In that national conflict the county furnished soldiers to the South and to the Union. John Amis and William (Bill) Strong raised a company for the Federal cause. It became a part of the so-called "Greasy Fourteenth," and was commanded by Col. H. C. Little. It was in this regiment that the noted Amis-Strong feud arose. It was the first of a series of bloody internecine strifes in that county. The hatred engendered during the Amis-Strong feud was more bitter than the sectional strife between the armies of the North and of the South. A feud between the two factions was not recognized to have existed, however, until about 1878.